William Morris and E. Belfort Bax

It is possible to succeed in a manner in picturing to
ourselves the life of past times: that is, our imaginations will show us a picture
of them which may include such accurate information as we may have of them. But though the picture may be vivid and the information
just, yet it will not be a picture of what really took place; it will be made up of
the present which we experience, and the past which our imagination, drawing from
our experience, conceives of, -- in short, it will be our picture of the
past(1). If this be the case with the past, of
which we have some concrete data, still more strongly may it be said of the future,
of which we have none -- nothing but mere abstract deductions from historic
evolution, the logical sequence of which may be interfered with at any point by
elements whose force we have not duly appreciated; and these are abstractions also
which are but the skeleton of the full life which will go on in those times to
come.

Therefore, though we have no doubt of the transformation of modern civilization
into Socialism, yet we cannot foretell definitely what form the social life of the
future will take, any more than a man living at the beginning of the commercial
period -- say Sir Thomas More or Lord Bacon -- could foresee the development of
that period in the capitalism of to-day.

Nevertheless, though we cannot realize positively the life of the future, when the
principle of real society will be universally admitted, and applied in practice as
an everyday matter, yet the negative side of the question we can all see, and most
of us cannot help trying to fill up the void made by the necessary termination of
the merely militant period of Socialism. The present society will be gone, with all
its paraphernalia of checks and safeguards: that we know for certain. No less
surely we know what the foundation of the new society will be. What will the new
society build on that foundation of freedom and co-operation? -- that is the
problem on which we can do no more than speculate.

No doubt some transition, the nature of which will be determined by circumstances,
will take place between the present state of things, in which the political unit is
a nation, and the future, in which a system of federalized communities will take
the place of rival nationalities; but as this chapter has to do with the ultimate
realization of the new society rather than with the transitional period, we need
not speculate on this point.

We ask our readers to imagine the new society in its political aspect as an
organized body of communities, each carrying on its own affairs, but united by a
delegated federal body, whose function would be the guardianship of the
acknowledged principles of society; it being understood that these two bodies, the
township or community and the Federal Power, would be the two extremities between
which there would be other expressions of the Federal principle, -- as in districts
that were linked together by natural circumstances, such as language, climate, or
the divisions of physical geography.

It is clear that in such a society what laws were needed for the protection of
persons and the regulation of intercommunal disputes, since they could be but the
expression of the very root principles of society, would have to be universal, and
the central regulating body would be charged with their guardianship, and at a last
resort to carrying them out by force. Obviously no community could be allowed to
revert to the exploitation of labour of any kind under whatever pretext, or to such
forms of reaction as vindictive criminal laws. Such measures if allowed, even as
local and spasmodic incidents, would undermine the very foundations of communistic
society. This unity in Federation in short, appears to be the only method for
reducing complexity in political and administrative matters to a minimum; and of
ensuring to the individual, as a unit of society, the utmost possible freedom for
the satisfaction and development of his capacities.

As to the methods of labour necessary to the existence and welfare of society, it
would have to be co-operative in the widest sense. It would of course be
subordinate to the real welfare of society; i.e., the production
of wares would not be looked upon as the end of society (as the production of
profit-bearing wares now is), but it would be regarded as the means for
the ease and happiness of life, which therefore would never be sacrificed to any
false ideas of necessity, or to any merely conventional views of comfort or luxury.
For instance, in any society it is desirable that cotton cloth should be produced
at the least expenditure of labour, but in a communistic society it would be
impossible to condemn a part of the population to live under miserable conditions,
conditions in any degree worse than that of others, as in a black country, in order
to reduce the expenditure of labour for the community, which would have to pay the
price for giving the weavers and spinners, etc., as good a life as anyone else,
whatever that price might be.

Again, as to the conventional standard of comfort: we may here quote a good
definition of a luxury, as given by a friend, as a piece of goods that the consumer
would not have if he had in his own person to pay the full value of the work --
i.e., if he had to make it himself, or to sacrifice an amount of his own
labour equivalent to the making of it. As, eg., a lady of the present day
would hardly consent to make a Mechlin lace veil for herself, or to pay for the due
and proper livelihood of those who do make it; in order that she may have it,
numbers of women and girls at Ypres and the neighbourhood must work at starvation
wages.

To make the matter of production under Communism clearer let us consider the
various kinds of work which the welfare of Communal Society would demand.

First, there would be a certain amount of necessary work to be done which would be
usually repellant to ordinary persons; some of this, probably the greater part of
it, would be performed by machinery; and it must be remembered that machinery would
be improved and perfected without hesitation when the restrictions laid on
production by the exigencies of profit-making were removed. But probably a portion
of this work at once necessary and repellant could not be done by machinery. For
this portion volunteers would have to be relied upon; nor would there be any
difficulty in obtaining them, considering that the habit of looking upon necessary
labour from the point of view of social duty would be universal, and that now, as
then, idiosyncrasies would exist which would remove objections to work usually
disliked.

Again, the greater part of this work, though not agreeable, would not be exacting
on mental capacity, and would entail the minimum of responsibility on those engaged
in it. We mention this as compensatory of the disagreeable nature of the work in
itself.

As examples of this necessary and usually repellant work, we may give scavengering,
sewer-cleaning, coal-hewing, midwifery, and mechanical clerk's work.

It must be remembered again that under our present system a great deal of this kind
of work is artificially fostered for the sake of making business for
interest-bearing capital, and that the competition for employment amongst the
proletariat makes it possible to be so done; whereas in a Communal Society such
work would be dispensed with as much as possible. Disagreeable work which a
Communal Society found itself saddled with as a survival of past times, and which
it found out not to be necessary, it would get rid of altogether.

Secondly, work in itself more or less disagreeable, and not absolutely necessary,
but desirable if the sacrifice to be paid for it were not too great. This might be
done if it could be made easy by machinery, but not otherwise; it would not be
worth while to call for volunteers for the purpose of doing it, since the citizens
would then have to make the sacrifice in their own persons. Before we leave the
subject of work not generally pleasant, but which is either necessary or desirable,
we may again call attention to the existence of idiosyncrasies which would make
many people willing to undertake it, and still more to the variety of tastes which
are so common that they could not be classed as idiosyncrasies, and which would
help us out of many difficulties in this respect. There are, for instance, rough
occupations involving a certain amount of hardship, which would be acceptable to
many persons of overflowing health and strength, on account of the adventure and
change which goes with them, and the opportunities which they afford for showing
courage and adroitness and readiness; in a word, for the pleasurable exercise of
special energies, such as sea-fishing, exploration of new countries, etc. Again,
many people have so much love for country life and dealing with animals, that even
hard work of this kind would not seem irksome to them. In short, we might go into
great lengths on this subject, and every step we took on the road would show that
the stimulus to exertion in production is much more various and much more complex
than is usually thought in a period like our own, when everything is supposed to be
measured by mere cash-payment.

Thirdly, we come to a kind of work which we may well hope will take a much higher
position in communal life than it does at present; we mean work that has in it more
or less of art; and we should here say that the very foundation of everything that
can be called art is the pleasure of creation, which is, or should be felt in every
handicraft. That even as things are it is very commonly felt, is proved by the
craving that persons have for some occupation for their hands when they are
debarred from their usual occupation, as very notably persons in prison. As to the
matter of art as an occupation, we may divide it into incidental and
substantive art. Incidental art is that which is subservient to some
utilitarian function; as the designed form or added ornament in a knife or a cup,
which is subservient to the cutting or drinking use of those things. What is
commonly called decorative art comes under this heading. Substantive art is that
which produces matters of beauty and incident for their own sakes, such as pictures
or music, which have no utilitarian purpose. As to incidental art Commercial
Society has nearly destroyed it by divorcing its exercise and the reward for it
from the products which it should beautify; it has divided the producers of an
ornamental article of use into the maker of the utilitarian article, the maker of
the ornament for it, and the designer of the ornament, the two former being mere
machines, and the latter being the producer of a marketable ware to be forced on
the public in the same way that other wares are forced on them by commerce. In a
Communal Society this division of labour will be recognized as impossible in a
piece of goods of which the art of design formed an integral part, and that art
itself will only be exercised in answer to an undoubted and imperative demand of
the public; there will be no occasion to force a demand for it.

As to the substantive art that must always be on the surface the product of
individual labour and skill, although at bottom it is a social product as much as
or even more than any other production; since the capacity of the most original
artist or author is really the result of tradition, and his work is the expression
of a long social development of tendencies concentrated in the special individual.

A question may occur to some as to the probable future of the races at present
outside civilization. To us it seems that the best fate that can befall them is
that they should develope (sic) themselves from their present condition,
uninterfered with by the incongruities of civilization. Those of them will be the
happiest who can hold civilization aloof until civilization itself melts into
Socialism, when their own natural development will gradually lead them into
absorption in the great ocean of universal social life.

1.The mediæval painters naïvely accept
this position -- eg., in representing the life of a saint of the second
century, they dress the characters in a costume but little altered from that of
their own period; and it is worth noting that they gave up the attempt at
archeology (sic) altogether with the more familiar characters -- a
carpenter or blacksmith will be just the craftsman that they had before their eyes
every day; whereas the emperors, giants, and so forth, they do try to clothe in
imaginative raiment. A further illustration may be given in the art of music: works
such as Weber's der Freischutz or Wagner's Meister-singers, which seem to embody
the spirit of past ages, nevertheless are in themselves thoroughly modern back.